Between Tradition and Modernity

This collection begins with the essay "Toda Society: Between Tradition and Modernity" to provide the background for all that will follow. The next two chapters deal with aspects of Toda ethnography, but presented in radically different ways. Chapter 3 is a polemical paper, attacking some and supporting other modern secondary analyses of the Toda kinship and marriage systems. Chapter 4 is a straightforward account of a famous Toda ritual: the giving by a man of a symbolic bow-and-arrow to a woman. Chapter 5 takes up the subject namely, the earliest Christian missions to the Toda Community. Chapter 6 deals with the Toda people who have thoroughly charmed generation upon generation of Westerners. Chapter 7 discusses whether the designation of certain types of human societies as "tribes" or "tribal" has any explanatory value at all. The final chapter "Reporting the Toda: 1602-1993", is a bibliographical essay to indicate the extraordinary wealth of documentation available to the researcher of Toda socio-cultural institutions.

At present, Dr. Anthony Walker lives in Suva, Fiji, where he is Senior Research Fellow and Reader at the University of the South Pacific's Institute for Pacific Studies.